The Art of Taking It Easy: How to Cope with Bears, Traffic, and the Rest of Life's Stressors

by Brian King

a quote often attributed to William James, the father of American psychology, “We don’t laugh because we’re happy, we’re happy because we laugh.”

stress is our brain’s reaction to a perception of threat.

most of our stress is from percieved threats, not clear and present threats.

Learn to assess your stress. Learn to tell the difference between bears and traffic. The first thing we should do when we start to feel agitated or stressed is stop and ask ourselves, “Is this situation actually threatening?”

When stressed we should ask ourselves, is this an actual threat? If it is an actual threat,

We begin responding to stress before we have a chance to think about it. However, we have the ability to overcome our initial response.

Learning how to increase the right kind of prefrontal activity, or thoughts, and being able to consciously redirect choices made by other areas of the brain, is the key to living a less stressful existence.

if you don’t like the way you feel, change your mind .

the vast majority of the stress we experience is self-induced.

most of our stress is imaginary.

Worrying is nothing more than internally generated stress—stress

And that’s the thing about worrying, it does nothing to prevent bad things from happening. Worrying does not affect the outcome of a situation, it doesn’t make adverse events less likely to occur, it just makes our life less great.

If we can’t do anything to change a situation, what is the point of worrying about it?

Worry is one way that the brain can generate its own activity. Yes, worry relieves boredom. And I believe this is why most worrying occurs.

To overcome worry you have to redirect your train of thoughts. Change the channel in your brain.

Learning to keep our brain active can help us avoid excessive worrying.

Prolonged exposure to stress can have a negative impact on our physical health and general well-being.

Prolonged exposure to stress can contribute to a wide variety of physical illnesses.

Stress influences our emotions, and in turn our response to stress is influenced by our emotions.

Our stress response should be engaged only when it can help us.

Not only can stress negatively affect our health, it can also lead to unhealthy behaviors.

We are notoriously inept when it comes to changing our behavior. Our brain gets used to the tried-and-true behaviors that served us well in the past, and is often resistant to putting forth the effort to acquire new ones.

is harder to quit worrying, or to quit getting angry all the time. Yet, just as people can learn how to play the piano, people can learn to cope with and manage behaviors related to stress.

It is never too late to change how we cope with stress.

Resilience is our ability to recover from adversity, to bounce back or return to equilibrium after experiencing an adverse event. It is a major component in coping with and recovering from stressful events.

our thoughts make us resilient. How we process information and what we think following an adverse event has a great deal of influence over how quickly we will recover.

Psychological resilience is our ability to overcome a challenge, to bounce back after an adverse event, or to cope with stress. Resilience is highly related to happiness, and both are functions of how we think about the events we experience.

Feeling stressed is really feeling out of control, to put it very simply.

We need to learn to react to what actually happened, not what could have happened or what we thought was going to happen. When it comes to our own health and safety, there is no benefit to allowing ourselves to be affected by things that did not happen.

In many cases, we become enraged over incidents where nothing serious has actually happened to us (e.g., we may have been cut off in traffic, but there was no car crash). Learn to react to what has happened, not what almost happened or what could have happened.

being resilient means having the right kind of activity in the prefrontal cortex so that your amygdala doesn’t react to everything in our world as a potential danger.

In order to change our behavior, we need to: Learn to assess our stressful situations to determine if they are actually threatening and if there is something we can do about them. Learn to redirect our brain away from worrisome or negative thoughts. If simply changing our thoughts doesn’t work, then we can change our environment or activity. Repeatedly practice the behavior we want to exhibit.

Another way to think about stressful events from the perspective of your brain is that they represent problems that need to be solved.

If we wish to improve our stress management, we should also develop our problem-solving skills. Problem-solving skills can be improved by mastering any challenge that requires strategizing.

problem-solving skills, like most acquired functions of the brain, have to be maintained.

The best, and most important, way to raise resilient children is to be resilient in their presence. Period. When you blow up and overreact to traffic, think of that person sitting in the car seat behind you and the lessons they are learning.

The best way to teach a child how to handle stress is to model resilient behaviors in their presence and try to keep our worry or anger to ourselves. Allow children an opportunity to solve their own problems. Provide assistance and support, but give them a chance to attempt things on their own, and the opportunity to fail.

The more we experience, the more our brain also learns to solve problems.

The key to making some pretty significant changes in our lives is to adjust the way we think.

I am officially challenging you to do the gratitude challenge on Facebook. For a period of at least seven days, at the end of the day post the three things you are grateful for and then challenge others to do it as well.

Verbally expressing positive emotions, such as love or gratitude, to others can make us happier and in turn help us manage stress. Keeping a gratitude journal, specifically listing three things we appreciate about each day, can also make us happier.

Having a sense of humor means being able to understand things in multiple ways, and this is incredibly helpful in overcoming stress.

Humor is a natural stress-management tool. Reevaluating a situation to make a joke can help reduce negative thinking. The physical act of laughing reduces stress and stress-related physiological conditions.

We have a tendency to focus on negativity; we can reduce this by redirecting our thoughts or putting things into perspective.

Three things we can do in the moment to calm ourselves down: Deep breathing Physical exercise Force a smile

Money, and related issues, are some of the biggest sources of stress. Saving and living with minimal debt can be a tremendous help to alleviating stress.